


penance

by symphorophilia (klismaphilia)



Category: Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens (2015), Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Bittersweet Ending, Blood and Injury, Body Horror, Domestic Violence, Drug Abuse, Drug Addiction, Fight Sex, Heavy Angst, Hux is Not Nice, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, Implied/Referenced Self-Harm, Kylo Ren is Not Nice, Love/Hate, M/M, Major Character Injury, Marriage of Convenience, Masochism, Medical Trauma, Overdosing, Psychological Trauma, Self-Hatred, Sexual Content, Unhealthy Relationships, Verbal Abuse
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-02-06
Updated: 2018-03-15
Packaged: 2019-03-13 18:23:58
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 2
Words: 9,071
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13576344
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/klismaphilia/pseuds/symphorophilia
Summary: Their hands are matching shades of yellow beneath the fluorescent lights, and Hux thinks it’s beautifully ironic.





	1. Chapter 1

_one_

 

They’d been driving for what felt like days.

****

Perhaps it had been-- a few days, a few hours. What did it matter anymore? They were nothing. Armitage was nothing. Ben was nothing. The two of them, together, were simply figures in the crowd; faceless and blank and corroding beneath the weight of melancholic shame day after day. They’d been like this for awhile, Hux reminds himself, in a constant state of decay that only becomes more prominent with each passing day, each fleeting second of eternity spent inside this car.

****

Kylo’s fingers are in his mouth; a tab coated with some sort of hallucinogen is dissolving behind his lips, and Hux flicks his tongue out once it’s dissolved, laving over the hesitant, still-trembling digits that have yet to remove themselves from the chasm of his throat. Any further in and he thinks he might choke on Kylo’s hand, and wouldn’t that be a way to go, sputtering and coughing and _gagging_ over his dealer-turned-lover’s fingers.

****

It wouldn’t be the first time, at least.

****

Hux’s eyes slip closed; he heaves a deep breath.

****

“That’s it,” Kylo murmurs. “Just take it in. You don’t have to think anymore.”

****

“That’s what I should be saying to you,” Hux says, but he’s drifting away on a cloud, so far from his body that he’s numb with it, even amidst the burning landscape and the vibrant red sky leaking blood onto the windshield. He wonders if he’s dying.

****

A part of him has been wondering, for awhile.

****

“You can’t trust me,” Kylo’s saying, somewhere far away from him, and Hux nods in acquiescence. He can’t even trust himself; Kylo is hopeless, enigmatic. If they touch for too long, they’ll both be burned. But he doesn’t care, now, and he hasn’t in a long time. Minutes are passing. He’s delirious. He should be asleep. He should be working. He should be… not here, but somewhere else, in his bunk at the academy, or hovering over an operating table with his hand inside a patient’s abdomen, trying to force life back into them. But he isn’t; he never will be again.

****

That’s the most terrifying thing of all.

****

Hux moves his lips, twists them into what he figures is a terrible facsimile of a smile. “Trust is for the damned,” he whispers. “But we’re mad, and the mad are prone to lying.”

****

* * *

  


If Armitage Hux were asked to reconcile his present livelihood with his situation three months earlier, he would be forced to admit that he didn’t realize how it had come to this. Humiliation, perhaps-- or stress, if nothing else. But it was certainly humiliation that kept him holding his tongue between his teeth, and embarrassment, that would keep it there even to the point of death. He was _weak. Inadequate._ So, no matter how therapists attempted to prod or push, he would not speak, because he would not subject himself to further degradation.

 

He was a failed experiment, and now he was a faulty one too. Hux supposes that was one of the reasons it had become difficult  for him to speak, to sleep, to _escape,_ every moment of his waking life serving as a reminder of just how worthless he truly was, just how _pathetic_ he’d always been.

 

And oh, how he _loathed_ himself.

 

Once, Hux had taken pride in his appearance; his body, his reputation, his health. Now, his unruly exterior only serves as a reminder of his failure, a testament to his inner ruin. Standing before a mirror allows him time to take in the protruding ribs and purpling lines that layer his throat. His skin is jaundiced. His eyes are bloodshot. His hair is a mess, carelessly brushed back with fingers early in the morning, before he’d left his apartment. Shirt rumpled, jeans unwashed for the better part of a week. He considers what Brendol might have said, looking at the dreadful, disillusioned _creature_ that was once his bastard son; _can’t even dress yourself correctly, you pathetic child. As much of a mess as ever, needing your hand held through every minor slight you’ve suffered. Can’t take a hit, can’t throw a punch. What use are you, in the end?_

 

Hux lets out a spurt of laughter. It sounds wrong, broken, _spited_ in his ears. His eyelashes flutter as he brings a hand up to press against the bruised column of his neck, flesh hot to the touch and fingers trembling as they smooth along the mottled skin, tracing fingerprints with fingerprints, even though they don’t match up.

 

 _How the mighty have fallen,_ he thinks to himself, _and how the fallen do decay.  
_

 

* * *

 

The first time Armitage Hux laid his eyes on Ben Organa-Solo was in a dim, sparsely-lit operating room, sterile and reeking of antiseptic. He was laid out on a gurney, arms tucked up beside his torso, eyes shut tightly, so tightly his brow seemed to pinch. There was a hole in his gut-- the flesh was held back by pins, and one of his colleagues, Finn, was working on extracting the bullet laparascopically.

 

They hadn’t talked, that first time. Ben hadn’t been his patient.

 

Hux had gone over the paperwork, though, after Ben had been stitched back up and stapled shut; _the patient’s vital signs were BP 120/80 mm, Hg HR 80/min, and Glasgow Coma Scale (GCS) 15/15. On clinical examination, a one centimeter diameter entry wound was revealed at the left lower abdominal wall. There was no exit wound. [...] CT scan identified the bullet lying in the peritoneal-pelvic cavity. EL identified the bullet in the peritoneal cavity, with no other damages. Removal pending._

 

Well, he’d decided, closing the folder with a sigh. At least the man had been taken care of. Operating on a renowned lawyer’s son tended to hold some heavy drawbacks-- but Finn had done well enough, given his training, Hux supposed. Truth be told, he’d never thought much of the younger surgeon-- he seemed unfortunately _empathetic--_ but as long as he got the job finished, and didn’t give Hux any trouble doing it, he could care less about Finn’s character flaws.

 

Ben had left the hospital in as good a condition as was possible, given he’d been shot in the gut only a couple days earlier; Hux hadn’t seen him discharged, personally. He’d caught the younger man’s eye, though, as they’d passed each other in the corridor, Ben wearing a heavy, leather jacket that seemed almost too small on him, and Hux clad in a clinical, featureless white coat that reached to his mid-thigh, professional and impersonal for the time being.

 

Ben said, a long time afterward, that he preferred Hux’s scrubs to his coat; that he looked alive, covered in bloodied, blue polyester, as if he had a soul underneath the callousness he always tried to project.

 

Hux filed that information away, in the back of his mind; it wasn’t as though it would come in useful, anymore. He’d been fired not long after the incident; a botched incision during an open heart surgery. His patient had been diagnosed with coronary heart disease, and he’d been rushed into emergency in the midst of a heart attack. He’d administered anaesthesia at approximately 18:00 hours, before drawing the eight-by-ten incision for a coronary artery bypass graft. Sometime during the CABG-- before he’d inserted the wire to support the patient’s breastplate-- he’d nicked an artery.

 

His hands were shaking.

 

He lost the patient.

 

Brendol had stormed in that same night, furious, raving at him; he’d been at Hux’s apartment when he arrived home, had shoved him into the wall nearly the second that Armitage had gotten through the door. _Are you happy with yourself?_ He’d asked. _You killed the company head, you useless, moronic twat. Your own fucking benefactor, because you were stressed, because you were quivering the same way you did as a boy. Do you know how many strings I had to pull to make sure your position was secure? What a waste-- I try to help you and you ruin me all over again. You’re a stain on this family, Armitage. Nothing more, nothing less._

 

Nothing more.

 

Nothing less.

 

Brendol had kicked him; once, twice, three times, jamming the toe of his boot into his son’s sore ribs, Hux’s muscles tight and his shoulders aching from trying to keep his head off the ground. His vision was blurry; black spots dancing before his eyes, grey waves of static wavering on the horizon. He’d struggled to breathe, rasping, desperate for air.

 

When he managed to stand, it was morning.

 

The trial proceeding Snoke’s death had been an arduous affair, short as it was; Brendol had him stripped of his position, his name, his assets. And all for the sake of _power._ His father wanted to remind him of his place, just as he always had, and he had succeeded in ways that Armitage deluded himself into thinking impossible.

 

He slept in his car, that night.

 

It was winter; the winds were cold, but he’d run out of gas too quickly if he left the engine running. So instead he’d bundled himself underneath some coats and blankets, curled into a ball in the backseat, legs tucked close to his chest and arms held just beside his face. He’d slept the same way as a child; covers pulled over his head and teeth sunk into his forearm when he’d needed to muffle his tears. But Armitage didn’t cry, that night; he lay there, awake, disgraced, suffering in silence, eyes prickling with a weary sensation that was never surfeited and never gave way to even a single tear.

 

When he woke, he woke alone, rigidly positioned and unmoving.

 

He felt empty.

 

There was a void inside him that had been growing for years, something hidden deep within his body that he could never manage to reach; nothing helped to fill it. Whether he’d been stuffing himself full of food or drinking his weight in liquor, whether he spent a night crying into his pillow or drawing red marks onto the flesh of his thighs, whether he wrote his thoughts down or let his memories drift away and throw themselves down the drain with the blood he washed from his hands, nothing managed to satiate his emptiness.

 

He turned to drugs.

 

Kylo Ren, who wore the same face as Ben Organa-Solo, had recognized him immediately. He’d been reverent with Hux that first day, running a thumb over his cheek, claiming to feel his _pain,_ to know his _enmity._ He’d welcomed Hux with an arm around his shoulders and a ziploc filled with cocaine, mourning his loss alongside him like some type of prophetic sufferer who saw himself as Hux’s patron.

 

But Kylo was hardly a savior; just another broken, lonely soul, floating in the abyss, blindly reaching for a means of understanding his own self-hatred. They’d reconciled with each other, that was all. It was a means of escape and a method of transformation.

 

They both needed to _disappear._

 

* * *

 

Sometimes he sits on a ledge, with his feet dangling over the edge, legs kicking back and forth in time with the breeze. When he looks down, he can never quite tell whether he’s flying or falling; there are layers-upon-layers-upon-miles of buildings, all shifting with the wind and coming back to their place, strong and immovable.

 

Hux wonders if there’s a meaning behind it all; if the world is an over-large metaphor demanding to be contemplated, and he’s the only being that’s cued into it all.

 

Finn’s name was in the papers last week, and he’s been published in more medical journals in the past five months than Hux has in years, or so it seems; they call him a _savant,_ say that his _open and compassionate_ nature has aided patients just as much as his skill in performing surgical operations. They cite a recent face transplant performed on a patient suffering from severe neurofibromatosis, calling the procedure a _miracle_ that seemed near impossible previously.

 

Hux scowls, teeth sinking into the flesh of his lower lip until the skin splits and he can taste blood on his tongue.

 

He could’ve performed the same reconstruction in his _sleep._

 

Or perhaps he only likes to think so; perhaps he simply wants to _believe_ he still has some modicum of worth to society, some special _gift_ that only he is in possession of. And there’s Kylo, side eying him with a raised brow, just like always, taking a drag from the poorly-rolled blunt still held between two of his fingers. He exhales when he catches Hux staring, blowing the stream of ashy residue straight in the former doctor’s face, smirking when he receives a perturbed expression of disgust in return.

 

“You shouldn’t think so much, you know,” Kylo says, and he leans backward, further and further until he’s lying stretched out across the ground, his pale skin an overt contrast to the pitch that seems to be growing out of control beneath him. “It’s not good for your health.”

 

“So now you’re an expert on health, are you?” Hux retorts, wryly. Kylo laughs, reaches over, slides a hand along the exposed flesh of Hux’s thigh.

 

“Only yours,” he says, kneading the skin with his fingers, until Hux huffs and slaps his hand away, just as he always does. The sky is blue, and the air is warm again. Months have been passing. Hux doesn’t have the mind to know or care about how long it’s been, since he started. And that’s the power of the high, any high-- he’s living in a waking daydream, unaffected by reality.

 

It’s invincibility.

 

“Isn’t it, though?” Kylo asks, and Hux grits his teeth. He hadn’t meant to speak aloud.

 

“It’s true,” Kylo continues. “A city of pain, underneath our feet-- and maybe it’s the only thing we really deserve. But with this,” he holds the blunt out, waves it about for a fraction of an instant. “We’re above it all. And the agony… that _gut-wrenching, soul-ripping_ agony… is gone. Maybe it’ll return. Maybe it won’t. The beauty is that we don’t have to know.”

 

“But isn’t it better that we do?” Hux protests, barely cognizant of his own words. “Reality can’t be undone, Ren. No matter how much we hide, how much we withdraw… it never fully disappears. And you and I… we’re just dying a little more each day, knowing it but never accepting it.”

 

A hand finds his own, squeezes it tight.

 

“Let go, Hux,” Kylo tells him. “You’re thinking too much.”

 

* * *

 

When they first fuck, they’re both out of money, out of life and so in love they can’t think straight.

 

But not with each other-- never each other. No, it’s just the feeling, and they’re both riding the high of it, desperate to be elevated, fearful of the crash. Kylo would protest it if he thought he could; he does not like to show fear, and neither does Hux, but they’re latched together, clinging hands scrabbling for a grip on sweat-soaked skin, dirt clinging to their legs and their arms and the seam at which their bodies touch. If they were to separate they might both fall into oblivion, and somehow, it’s that notion that keeps them together, right up to the bitter end.

 

Kylo thrusts into him with shallow, half-formed movements, and Hux’s muscles ache and swell with exhaustion as he tears trenches into the map of Kylo’s skin. Kylo’s hand is on his neck and his chin is tilted up toward the sky and they’re falling into each other as much as they’re falling apart, like they can’t let go even when they’re no longer real.

 

Kylo’s talking to him, low, sweet in that indiscernible way that’s so like his anger it hardly sounds different.  “-- and it all hurts a little less when I’m inside you, feels like I’m patching up the wounds inside me--” Hux’s hand falls to his abdomen, feeling without seeing, and he traces the texture of the scar tissue that he finds, a reminder of a life barely saved, a life _he_ might have ruined if given the chance. Perhaps he’s ruining it now, or perhaps Kylo is ruining _him._

 

He reaches up and he smacks Kylo across the face, but Kylo doesn’t flinch. He surges forward and _kisses_ him, licks into Hux’s mouth like he wants to devour him whole, and Hux thinks about what he saw when he looked into Kylo’s body, how _normal_ it was, regardless of how deviant it feels now. He pulls at Kylo’s hair as if he’s trying to yank it from his scalp, and Kylo hums and tells him, _this is why we’re good together, Armie, this is why I’m yours._

 

“You’re mine?” He asks, echoing the only words that he needs in the midst of this chaos.

 

“Always,” Kylo tells him, “always, _always._ We belong together, because your crazy matches my crazy, and I get so fucked up when you’re not here. Like I want to tear the world apart because I can’t make the rest of them understand, oh, _Hux.”_

 

Hux kisses his forehead. He leans closer. Licks the tears from his cheeks, tastes the way the salt mingles with the blood on his tongue.

 

“Thank you for letting me _live,”_ he says to Kylo. “And thank you for wanting me to die.”

 

* * *

 

 

The days are growing warmer, now, and the sun never seems to leave the sky. Hux is sitting on the steps of a worn-down gazebo in the middle of a habitually frequented park, his shoes scuffing against the wood of the walkway before him.

 

He’d come here often, when he was younger and less disciplined, snuck out to meet with the friends he knew Brendol would’ve beaten him for having, played hooky and smoked cigarettes that they’d take turns pitching into the lake after they’d been brought down to their ends. In hindsight, Hux supposes that nothing much has changed; he still smokes, still makes bad decisions, still abhors his father, even as he endures his abuse.

 

It’s rather depressing to think that so many years have passed, and he’s done nothing but stay static.

 

Kylo’s hand rests on his shoulder, and his grip slides from Hux’s untoned bicep to the practiced joints of his wrist and hand; this touch has become a spot of solidarity, he’s grown to realize. It’s Kylo’s way of saying something without having to use words. Of course, the silence between them holds no animosity at this point-- but it’s so viscerally trancelike, so _fragile_ that Hux thinks it might break if they fill it with their words.

 

But it always breaks, eventually.

 

“I’m a disappointment,” he says, voice fraught with scorn. “I wanted nothing more than to escape this place, growing up, and now I’m sitting on the same steps I did as a child, high off my bloody arse on heroin. It’s cathartic, maybe. But I’m so tired.”

 

Kylo’s arm slides around his waist, pulling Hux’s lanky form against his still heaving chest. Hux braces himself against that touch at the same time he sinks into it. He wonders what he’s done to end up here, like this, in the present. He wonders _why_ he did anything to begin with.

 

“I feel it too.” Kylo confesses, and they’re lying together in the sunlight on the sidewalk, too dazed to see any of the glow, even as it warms their skin. Hux has one hand in Kylo’s hair, idly playing with the greasy strands; they both need a shower, he thinks. But Kylo is still talking and for the moment, this is more important than anything else.

 

“My mom’s a lawyer.” Kylo says, then.

 

“I know.”

 

“And I’m her junkie son.” He continues, tightening his hold on Hux until it feels as if their bodies will meld together. “She’s probably known for awhile. Han’s the same way.” He smirks, half-morose. “Y’know, they always say… you get older, you turn into your parents. Or you start to act like them, whatever. I always wanted to say it was a load of shit. But now… maybe I am starting to turn into them. I’m running from everything, same as Han did. I’m making bad decisions to try and stitch up that chasm that’s in here--” he taps his head with one finger. Hux has the inexplicable urge to kiss him. “-- but it doesn’t work. And I know it doesn’t, but I keep…”

 

“Repeating the procedure,” Hux finishes. “If I could fix it, I would. I’m good at fixing flesh wounds. Patching up insides. I was.” He swallows, choking on a fatigued sob that comes out as a chuckle. “Finn’s head surgeon now. That bleeding-heart little boy. They all think he’s some sort of big deal, like-- a hero? A savior? I like to believe it’s just because he’s so _nice_ that the press has hooked onto his career,” Hux spits. “Not because he has any talent. But then, I see myself, and I think, I didn’t have any talent either. I just pretended I did.” His hands are on Kylo’s cheeks now, looking into his eyes without seeing them in full, wondering if he could drown in the sorrow that lingers just beyond sight.

 

“Fuck, we’re a mess,” Kylo tells him, and his leg presses against Hux’s own as he bursts into laughter.

 

“We should take more,” Hux agrees. “I’m _feeling_ again. It’s a horrible design flaw.”

 

* * *

 

One night they decide to dance.

 

It’s sometime between midnight and morning, when the skies are too dark and the stars are too bright, and there’s a pervasive, eerie sensation of _calm_ that has settled over everything. Hux had a needle in his arm about thirty minutes ago, and his skin is matted with dried blood and opiates that leaked out from the injection site; shaky hands, he thinks. Not good for a surgeon, not good for an addict, either.

 

Kylo’s hand is in his and he’s resting his head against the other’ chest, arm lain over his shoulder as they sway back and forth to the unsteady beat of some dreadful song playing on the radio in the background. It’s all dulled out, though-- the only sensation he has is the overt texture of Kylo’s hands on him and his hands on Kylo.

 

Hux wonders if this is the breaking point.

 

He’s lost everything, he thinks. But somehow it doesn’t hurt so much to realize, not like it used to; he’d be content to stay here forever, even if it’s all a fabricated, synthetic life. Kylo feels the same. He doesn’t have to ask.

 

There are fights in between the highs that both of them keep trying to ignore; he screams obscenities at Kylo, calls him a _savage beast,_ a _despicable asshole,_ accuses him of playing pity party with himself because mommy dearest won’t indulge him; Kylo responds accordingly, smacks Hux across the face with an open palm, or shoves him onto the floor to lay his foot into his hollow-looking torso.

 

Kylo mocks him, too; _you never had anything before you met me, and we both know it. That’s why you’re here, isn’t it? You’re here because you want someone to put you on your back and pump you full of drugs and hit you, because underneath that cold exterior that you project, you feel worthless. And you are. You’re an addict. A slut. A bastard. You don’t even deny it._

 

And he doesn’t, never has, because it’s all true; Hux longs for recognition, and Kylo is the only one who is even remotely capable of providing him with it. Kylo needs somebody to understand his suffering, and Hux does, and so they’re _stuck_ with each other, even when they can’t stand it.

 

“Do you think it’s worth all of this?” He asks, finally, with Kylo’s thumb smoothing over the line of his jaw and the bruise that’s blossoming along the flesh there. He’d had Hux up against the wall that time, a hand around his neck and one on his shoulder, watching him with thin-skinned rage as Hux coughed and blood dribbled from the corner of his lips and he _spat_ in Kylo’s face, pinned down but not giving up the fight.

 

Kylo looks so young when he’s distraught, but he’s never seemed older than he does now, listening to Hux as he poses the question neither of them have dared to answer before.

 

He’s shaking.

 

“I… don’t know…” His teeth worry at his lower lip, and he withdraws suddenly, leaving Hux to stumble over the space he no longer occupies. “But… it can’t go back to how it was, before. The past is dead. _Ben_ is dead,” he rambles, slamming his fist into the cracked drywall beside their bed, tears streaking his face. They’re ugly tears, Hux thinks, and his face is blotchy, eyes puffy and red when he cries, and it’s exactly the way he’d cried before Brendol had beat it out of him and he _aches._

 

“I know.” He echoes, finally. “And I’m not asking you to be Ben. I’m asking you if you’re _alright_ with it all. What you’ve done. What I’ve done. What we _are,_ now.”

 

“I don’t know, Armitage.” Kylo won’t look at him. He’s staring out the window, and the tears are seeping back into his skin, leaving dead trails of salt in their place. “I don’t know anything, anymore.”

 

* * *

  


The skin of his arms is overlaid with rashes, red and cracked and absurdly irritated around each raised puncture mark imprinted on his body. His mouth feels dry when he swallows. The world doesn’t stop spinning around him, even when he’s asleep. The days mesh together into an endless array of grey that stretches out far beyond the thirty-five years Hux has to claim for himself.

 

It becomes harder and harder to keep the pain at bay.

 

A few days pass. A few weeks more. It’s distant, hazy, unfocused-- he doesn’t know when the last time he ate was. Can’t remember when he last took a shower. One morning he wakes up, dry heaving; barely makes it into the washroom before he’s keeled over and there’s bile soaking into the carpet, vomit clinging to his chest and he _can’t stand the smell of himself,_ so he stumbles into the shower and sits curled up in the corner of it and lets the water spray down on his vulnerable, frail figure for what seems like an eternity.

 

Hux dissociates; going between varying states of consciousness, fading out to a warm embrace and in to the reality of his soaked, trembling vessel, still curled up among the tile of the shower floor.

 

He remembers studying addiction at university, a lifetime ago; lucid dreaming had sounded so fascinating. He’d wondered what it would be like, to float in and out of your body and drift about the world in a half-live state; now he’s getting his wish. His mouth fills with spit that tastes like blood. He doesn’t remember how to move.

 

When they take him into the emergency room, Kylo’s at his side, holding his hand. Their hands are matching shades of yellow beneath the fluorescent lights, and Hux thinks it’s beautifully ironic. He wonders if the doctors will take Kylo away from him-- knows they will, somehow. His legs tremble in their restraints, slamming erratically against the immovable texture of the stretcher; he feels like he’s having a seizure. There’s someone standing over him, clad in blue scrubs instead of a white coat, and all Hux can think is that it really does seem more vibrant, more _real._ Their skin is dark. Their eyes are too expressive. He wants to vomit again, because _isn’t this just his luck?_ He’s dying and Finn’s the one they’ve chosen to save his life, and maybe he really _is_ better than Hux, because Hux wants to punch him even as he’s convulsing, wants to _hate_ him because he’s so inherently good and yet he _can’t,_ can’t hate Finn, even when he so desperately wants to. He can’t even hate _Kylo._

 

Leia Organa is standing by the door, and she’s holding Kylo in a way that Hux would hardly have thought possible before this moment. He’s crying and shouting and looks like he wants to punch something, wants to _kill_ something. Hux wouldn’t blame him at all if he did; he often thinks of murder himself.

 

“T-take _care_ of him--” he hisses out between wheezes, reaching up to grab hold of Finn’s scrubs as he leans over him. “Tell her-- t-tell her to _take care of_ him--”

 

The mask goes over his face.

 

He doesn’t hear the response.


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> They’re running themselves into the ground, but neither of them are doing it alone, they’re killing themselves slowly but they’re doing it together, the fucked up products of a traumatic and loathsome existence. And maybe, Kylo considers, just maybe, that’s what is going to save them both.

_two_

 

Ben Solo was a troubled boy.

 

That was what they had always said about him, in hushed tones, behind closed doors and over lines of text they’d tried so carefully to hide, desperate to keep their words from reaching his _naive young ears._ His mother had been temperamental too, once-- but she’d honed it, kept her rebellious ways controlled with a sense of poise and distinction and _diction_ that Ben had never been lucky enough to understand.

 

He was more like his grandfather, in that way. The uncouth, outspoken and _terribly sad_ man who, in a fit of rage, had tried to strangle his own wife in the midst of a dissociative episode. The man whose identity had been so full of pain and poverty and worry and frustration that _nobody_ had ever known how to help him; _Anakin Skywalker,_ the dishonorable-discharge that never had the chance to know his own children.

 

Leia would’ve kept his name from Ben; long had she guarded her own childhood, the slaughter of her adoptive parents, the true origin of her inheritance. Nineteen years of age and the sole beneficiary to the Organa legacy. Not because she was particularly mature, lucky or well-off, though her intellect was something not to be questioned, but because her parents had been murdered.

 

And she’d seen the murderer-- her _true father,_ and the supposed _allies_ that he’d surrounded himself with-- in her own son. In his tantrums. In his anger. In his anxiety, his egocentrism, his self-loathing. Because _Ben Solo was a troubled boy,_ but only when she could no longer pretend he wasn’t. _Ben Solo was a troubled boy,_ but only because Leia didn’t understand him, and couldn’t be made to put in effort enough to try.

 

He loved his mother, but he _loathed_ Leia Organa.

 

His father had been there, more, strangely enough; always on the move, hopping from place to place, dealing drugs and selling shit out of his beat-up 50’s van. Han was an enigma, but the child-Ben had been endlessly fascinated by his cheap card tricks and his sleight of hand. Han made running away look so easy that Ben had forgotten how to stay in one place. When Leia dragged him back, at the end of his eleventh summer, with a glare and a hushed curse in his father’s direction, he’d simply tried to run away again; thought that if he wasn’t good enough to be a lawyer’s son, he could at least be the son of a crook, and could at least do it _right._

 

(He couldn’t, of course, but he didn’t know that until later.)

 

(He couldn’t because _Ben_ didn’t belong, not anywhere, not with anyone, be it the family that _claimed_ to love him while hiding his true self from the rest of society, ashamed of just how far he’d fallen and just how much he’d fucked himself over, or the friends who could never understand him, the cousin whom he’d trusted and yet never managed to be honest with, not until she’d been standing over him in the hospital calling him _selfish, twisted, addict.)_

 

But that story, that _pain,_ had been told and told _to death_ so long ago that it hardly seemed real, anymore. The past needed to die. Kylo Ren would have it burn.

 

He’s lying stretched out on a questionably clean, and impossibly hard floor. The soft brush of hair pressed close to the crook of his neck tickles his nose, and when Kylo finally takes the chance to shift out of the blankets and open his eyes with a groan, he finds the culprit easily.

 

A cat. She’s chubby, unnaturally fluffy, and her chest puffs out imperiously when she stands with a paw planted flat in the center of his chest. The animal stretches upward, shakes herself out-- and then turns around and lies back down atop Kylo’s fucking _face_ , her tail flicking against his ear several times before she stills.

 

In ordinary circumstances, Kylo would push her off, maybe give her a little insult before reaching down to scratch her behind the ears when she levels him with a sharp glare. The little monster isn’t even _his,_ she belongs to _Hux,_ of all people, and probably rivals him in bitchiness, which Kylo considers a feat in and of itself. He chuckles, rueful, a scarred hand brushing over the soft fur that’s chosen to disturb his rest, eyes staring vacantly past the orange blur near his chin, instead finding the pinned-in-place ceiling of the beat up Volkswagen van.

 

His dad called the van the ‘ _Millenium Falcon’,_ because he’d bought it at the turn of the millenia and thought the name sounded cool. It’s an ugly, beat-up old thing, rusted around the wheels and dilapidated inside, two of the seatbelts haphazardly fashioned out of hauling rope, the floor littered with torn candy bar wrappers and empty soda cans. Hux would pitch a fit if he saw; sort of like Leia used to, with Han. It was years ago since Ben had last gone on a trip with his father. Han had pulled him out of bed for nighttime cruises in the summer, taken him adventuring through the desert or up along the windy East Coast, telling him impractical, impossible stories and living off of the truck-stop food they picked up wherever Han decided to refuel.

 

Ben had loved those trips.

 

But then, Ben was an _innocent_ ; a _troubled child,_ who couldn’t understand why his outbursts were wrong, couldn’t fathom why his parents hardly ever stood in the same room without engaging in an argument. Ben was a _victim,_ and a _menace,_ and a _sensitive little boy_ all at once, before he’d understood what half the words he’d heard his parents spit at each other actually meant, before he’d even _wanted to._

 

Ben was _dead._

 

Kylo moved out when he was seventeen, had his mother sign off on documents so he could be legally emancipated. He didn’t even flinch when Leia told him she’d miss him, that she was _sorry_ she wasn’t a better mother, that if he ever wanted to _come home_ she’d be there waiting for him.

 

(Kylo didn’t want to “go home.” Didn’t even know where home was, really, since he’d spent half his youth at a _boarding school_ with his fucking _uncle,_ instead of his own parents.)

 

It still hurt, sometimes. Still ate at him, some gnawing beast hidden behind his flesh-mask and the sinews of muscle that layered his body, claws scrabbling at the inside of his skin, tearing at his sternum desperate to rip itself free, take him over once and for all. Because Kylo had been angry, _always angry,_ ever since he was eleven years old and his parents decided to move to opposite sides of the country, leaving him with _Luke_ , to his motherfucking-goddamned-insane _Uncle Luke_ and a bunch of immature brats who didn’t understand anything about how it felt to suffer.

 

They didn’t know. _Nobody_ knew, not for a long while, and Kylo had only done exactly what all disillusioned teenagers do when they don’t know where they’re going and don’t think they have anything left to lose.

 

He started smoking.

 

* * *

  


It was tobacco, first; those _cancer sticks_ that he’d stand out by the rickety-fence near highway 84 and puff on, the same ones he was still crushing under his boot ‘til this day. As a kid, he’d started small; one pack every couple weeks, until it wasn’t enough and he didn’t know how to _deal_ with it, because the smoke was like a friend when nothing else could be, and suddenly it was _abandoning him_ just like everything else.

 

Smoking had been one of Han’s vices, but Han had a lot of those; escape mechanisms, avoidance techniques, tricks of the trade. Pills were another. Booze, blood, cards-- Ben knew the stories. His father grew up hustling in California, accompanied only by his long-time partner-in-crime, Lando Calrissian. They’d met in the foster system, been stuck together in the same rundown dump of a house. Han said he hated it because the _anger_ got to him. He used to roll blunts with the Oakland newspaper, or better yet, pages from the bible. _Light paper is better for it,_ he’d remarked, once.

 

Han probably hadn’t thought that Kylo would pick it up so quickly, himself. But Ben Solo was desperate to escape, and so he’d done everything he could to _try._ He’d got somebody to sell him half a bottle of Xanax when he was seventeen; they dulled him out, blocked the world, the frustration, the fear. Smoke some marijuana on top of that, and he was all set. Didn’t even have to remember his parents. Didn’t have to remember the way they’d _betrayed_ him, setting him up for failure. Because Leia was famous and Han was infamous, and Ben was just the byproduct of their mistake in marrying each other.

 

Drugs were a good outlet for his self-loathing.

 

But they hadn’t dulled his anger, not all the way; no, that came later.

 

Hux was an addiction, too, after all. And Kylo _loved_ to corrupt people who wanted to be perfect.

 

* * *

  


The first time Kylo had seen Armitage Hux, he’d been the one lying half-conscious in a hospital bed, bandages layering his torso, his eyelids fluttering without a purpose. The doctor wore a set of blue scrubs, too bright for his pallor, they nearly washed him out; but there was blood across the front of the shirt, unwashed and unclean as it was. It matched the man’s bright, russet-gold hair, burnished like the lit end of a Camel, bright as the flame on his lighter. Kylo hadn’t seen him well enough, then. But the blood was something he’d never forget, and he wanted to see _more._

 

Hux wore bruises well, when Kylo wrapped his hands around his scrawny neck, pressed his thumbs crosswise over his jugular and told him to _shut your fucking mouth, you don’t know anything._ He’d loved it even the first time and hadn’t grown out of that particular inclination; it was obvious that Armitage was a masochist, as his pants tightened and his crotch hardened whenever Kylo had the grace to strike him. He didn’t do it often; Hux didn’t deserve the _courtesy_ of being hit by him, because Hux was nothing, same way Ben had always been nothing.

 

But Ben hadn’t been _perfect,_ and he hadn’t been near as pretty, either. Hux was always so controlled, so _disciplined_ that it sometimes made Kylo feel sick. He wanted to wipe that indifference from the surgeon’s features indefinitely, wanted to pull him loose from his impersonal white coats and impersonal ties and button-downs and _pressed jeans, pressed trousers_ until Hux gave them up altogether. And he did, when he was high. Hux _died_ when he was high, and Armitage came out and Armitage was _fun._ Fun, because he wanted to be abused and he liked it, because he was a slut for _pain_ and that was something that Kylo couldn’t ignore. Hux’s father had beaten him for so long that he ought to have beaten the pain out of him, too; maybe he had, eventually, but he didn’t manage to get rid of the deviancy. Because Armitage still wanted to be beaten, and wanted to crawl across the floor on his knees and kiss Kylo’s feet and _beg_ for the punishment that he’d been conditioned to crave. Hux coveted punishment for his own pleasure, and perhaps this was the only way he’d ever been able to own his agony, the same way Kylo learned to own his by _projecting._

 

Hux was beautiful, broken.

 

He never cried when Kylo fucked him, never cried unless he was high, because then he was uninhibited and he couldn’t reign the anger in anymore. No, Hux was above it all, and he’d laugh at Kylo, mocking him in a condescending voice, _sounds like_ _you’re just like your father, Ren, running away from all your problems like a scared little boy. What, didn’t he love you enough? Didn’t mummy dearest, the good little lawyer that she was, teach you the setbacks of violence? How it’s just a tool for delusional brutes to try and assert their dominance because they’re too foolish and savage to figure out how to show it otherwise? Must make you feel like a big boy, beating up your_ little whore _like this. Are you a big boy, Ben? Are you a big, ugly, incompetent brute?_

 

Kylo would sneer-- _you’re full of talk, you pathetic bitch._ And then he’d twist Hux’s arm halfway behind his back and wrestle him onto the floor, all the while Hux panted and hissed in delight at the pain, never denying his words, only spitting at him. _Playing at psychoanalysis because you want somebody to fuck you until you can’t move. Because daddy beat you so much that you started to think it was the only way to love. You want me to use you. You want me to punish you._

 

And always, without fail, Armitage would respond _yes._

 

Until now.

 

* * *

  


Armitage Hux is lying in a hospital bed, and he’s never looked quite so pale. The color seems to have gone even from his hair, and it’s dying in his eyes, on his cheeks, everywhere that Kylo tries to look. His body is so _still,_ nestled in between beige blankets and white sheets, and Kylo can practically count his ribs beneath the fabric of his hospital gown. Somehow, he doesn’t look real. Maybe he never was.

 

Hux had seemed more like a doll to him than a human, for awhile. Maybe Kylo was just his propholder: the stand-in for the abusive father and abusive classmates and abusive benefactor, countless unnamed figures whose claim on Hux ran deeper than even Kylo had been allowed to know.

 

He pushes a hand through Armitage’s hair, brushing it away from his face; when it’s gelled back he’d always looked stern, severe, impenetrable. As though there were nothing in the world capable of fazing him.

 

Now he looks like an addict.

 

Kylo wonders if it’s his fault that Hux is here, lying catatonic under too-clean sheets. He wonders if he was so _desperate_ to have somebody cling to him, so desperate to tangle himself in another’s arms, that he’d corrupted Hux instead, or if nothing else dragged him straight to his deathbed. But he knows better, too; Hux had been corrupted long before he’d ever met Kylo Ren. He was wrong in the most right of ways; a testament to the limits of repression and regression that humans could experience. And Kylo, _ever the unfortunate,_ thinks that’s why he loved him.

 

He did. _Love_ Armitage, that is. He can’t deny it, now; not when Hux’s last words had been _take care of him, promise me you’ll take care of him,_ hissed out through a fucking respirator while his numbed out hand clutched at his rival’s chest, eyes wandering to some distant place far beyond the vision of a living human.

 

At least he’d survived, Kylo thinks.

 

At least, he adds, selfishly, he’s still _with me._

 

* * *

 

 

It takes Hux three days before he fully regains consciousness.

 

He'd been mumbling on and off through the nights, tone switching frantically between hurried pleas and disgusted curses, brow furrowed and nose twitching from time to time while his useless muscles spasmed with tension. The seizures are going to persist, Finn tells them. “He needs to stay here until he can make a full recovery.”

 

But Hux is stubborn, bitter and seething at the world. Rendered useless in a hospital bed, at the mercy of his former colleagues and holding Kylo’s hand like a bloody _child._ He doesn't want Finn poking and prodding him with needles, telling him what is or isn't good for his mind and body. Finn doesn't have any idea what's _best_ for Armitage, the addict, because he's no longer Hux, the surgeon. Hux, his _superior._

 

Kylo squeezes Hux’s hand; eyes him with a sense of knowing, unfortunately _tolerant._ He doesn't like this anymore than Armitage does--doesn't trust the doctors, not now, not after everything that's happened. Finn is engaged to his cousin, after all, and in that connection his mother will finally have the good, well-meaning son that she's always wanted. Leia has been calling him for days, demanding his word that he’s quit using, demanding that he break it off with Hux, get treatment, _come home_.

 

 _She's never cared before,_ he wants to say. _Didn't want me to express myself publicly. Thinks I'm still Ben, the failure, the outlier, the_ **_sensitive child_ ** _driven out of his own mind._

 

“Thanks,” Kylo says, thinking of Rey, and her heartfelt grin, her headstrong, courageous attitude, her deeply-buried empathy. She matches well with Finn the doctor-- resilient despite the odds, mature to a fault, empathetic and compassionate and _desperate_ to care for someone the way he seems to need to be cared for. They’re a perfect couple, really, the headstrong, good-natured daughter that Leia would have called her own and her loving, surgeon boyfriend, the doting and considerate son. “But we're fine.”

 

Hux grips to Ren’s hand tighter, the only show of solidarity that holds any sort of significance in the present. His watery, dull eyes continue to watch Kylo as he curls fingers around the fine bones of Hux’s wrist, unblinking but unconcerned. Hux only swallows as Finn shakes his head, and grips Kylo’s hand right back, clinging to the offered touch like a lifeline, full of insecurity that’s been brimming over with rage.

 

“You'll receive a payment soon.” The worn-out Hux rasps evenly ( _and how hoarse and weak his voice has become)_. “But Kylo and I are leaving.”

 

They haven't let him have morphine, here. No painkillers to satiate his mood, nor his appetite. Hux is a trembling mess of understimulated wretchedness, aching with need, dripping with desire. Kylo looks over his frigid, ice-cold skin, his twiggish frame, his sweat-soaked brow, ginger hair matted to his forehead, chest heaving from the effort of trying to hold himself together when he’s desperate to fall apart. Kylo sees Hux _breaking,_ and by God, he wants to kiss him senseless, hurt him until he can’t feel the pain any longer. Nothing is alright.

 

But a week later, when Hux is shaking and crying and vomiting in Kylo’s arms, Kylo thinks it might get better. Hux still needs him-- and Kylo still needs Hux. Hux is weak and always has been, a man forged from the same materials as the teenage Ben Solo, but more determined than ever to function, more determined to _live_ than even Ben might have been previously.

 

And Kylo, much to his own surprise, _wants_ it to be better. He wants to _save_ Armitage, keep him close, keep him _at his side,_ because Armitage is the only one who has the incentive to leave him, and in spite of it all, is the only one who still has yet to do so.

 

Kylo Ren _loves_ Armitage Hux.

 

They won't stop smoking or shooting up, won’t quit fucking around or screaming curses at each each other. There’s no reason to stop, not really. Both Kylo and Hux are self-medicating in the best way they know how. And if nothing else, they have each other, through the mess of it. They’re running themselves into the ground, but neither of them are doing it _alone,_ they’re killing themselves slowly but they’re doing it together, the fucked up products of a traumatic and loathsome existence. And maybe, Kylo considers, just maybe, _that’s_ what is going to save them both.

 

* * *

  


Kylo Ren is standing on the edge of a precipice and he can’t see the ground beneath.

 

He’s flying too high, riding on the coattails of self-assurance and self-pity, and Hux is right there with him, lying pressed up against his side in the warm, desert air, stretched out across the rocky ground of the land they’ve laid claim to for the night. Hux is sticky, skin flushed and pink, but he fits into Kylo’s side so well it’s like he’s belonged there from the very beginning. His veins protrude starkly from his paper-thin skin, and Kylo grips to him like a book-end, keeping him pinned, refusing to relinquish the touch of Hux’s body against his own.

 

There are track marks lined up along his forearm, climbing into the nook of his elbow, red-rimmed, anemic and swollen in his flesh. Kylo’s own arms are similar, if more disorganized; there’s no order to his own shameful indiscretions, and the pock-marks that remain from previous abuse never managed to fully leave. Hux laughs at the discord of his canvas when Kylo pulls him closer, mouth pressed in a line to Hux’s shoulder, spooning him from behind, hips nestled against the ginger’s well-formed rear.

 

 _Incorrigible,_ Hux tells him, _even after you’ve had me you’re back demanding more. Can you ever be sated, you mongrel?_

 

 _No,_ Kylo admits, honest. He smirks, presses closer nonetheless. “You love it.”

 

“I _hate_ it,” Hux insists, tone belying no trace of anger. He laces their hands together, squeezes hard enough to strain Kylo’s bones. “I hate what you’ve made me into.”

 

He turns, suddenly, jerking out of Kylo’s reach and slamming their lips together, fisting at his hair, straddling his waist. “I hate your ugly tears. I hate your smug voice. I hate the sadness in your eyes-- how pathetic you are, really. I hate your philistine views and your disconnected behavior. I hate your hideous nose and your giant ears and your filthy _mouth._ I hate your pretty ass and your giant cock. I hate your sullen, petulant voice. But most of all, I hate your heart.”

 

“So why do you stick around?” Kylo asks, a pang of worry striking him to the core. But Hux is ever present in his grip, real and solid and _tangible_ like a lover should be. Kylo should hate him too; wants to kill him for his insolence. Keeps him close out of necessity and fear, should Hux ever speak of him to another were he to leave. The ex-surgeon adjusts himself in Ren’s lap, leaning back to brace himself on the drug dealer’s thighs, humming as he considers the inquiry.

 

“Because I love you, too.” The hand in his hair relaxes; Hux brushes the strands away from his face, leans closer until their breaths mix as one in the air between their mouths. “But I hate that about myself.”

 

“I know,” Kylo tells him, earnestly. “I hate that about you, too. Hate that you stay with me. That you tolerate me. That you lie so sweetly it never fails to leave scars in my head when you try to cut me with your words. I hate that you exist. I hate that you _love_ me, because I hate that I’ve fallen in love with you.”

 

Hux doesn’t speak; he doesn’t have to. Kylo opens his mouth to the invitation of a kiss, drinks him in anyway. Armitage is a drug without an antidote and Kylo doesn’t mind swallowing that poison if it’s as sweet as Hux makes it out to be.

 

* * *

  


They are jaundiced and battered, victims and abusers. Made of antipathy and animosity, exasperated by their own desires.

 

The worst thing of all is that this is exactly what they’ve always wanted; beautiful revulsion, and the comfort of derision. Two-hundred and fifty-six days have passed since Kylo left behind his home, his family and the remnants of Ben Solo; two-hundred and fifty-six days have disappeared as Armitage Hux pulled himself free from reality. They don’t own much; their skin, the clothes on their backs, and a beat-up Volkswagen van that neither of them much love. Hux says the van is hideous, says Kylo is a demanding wreck, but he lets the man fuck him on the floor and kiss the tears from his cheeks regardless. Kylo tells Hux that he wishes they’d never met, thinks he’s a manipulative little whelp desperate to drain the world of satisfaction; but he doesn’t say ‘no’ when Hux sticks a ring on his finger, and he doesn’t tell him off for it, either.

 

They’ve been traveling for a long time, longer than either of them truly realize; injecting themselves with the same opioids that bleed from their veins and leak from their mouths when they’re beyond themselves, snorting the same stimulants that color their skin with rashes and fill their brains with as many holes as their hearts. But it’s okay, because after everything else, intimacy is just another addiction to add to the mix; fighting is a side effect, marriage is a medication. Neither of them would have it any other way.

 

They say their vows on the beach, after bathing in the roll of saltwater waves and dressing in an old fisherman’s post, abandoned just after the last big storm. Kylo takes Hux to breakfast in a diner.

 

“I could imagine myself living here,” Armitage says, once he’s finished with his oatmeal and downed half a mug of black coffee.

 

“Really?” Kylo asks. “Always took you for more of a urban city sort of type. Probably the prissy clothes.”

 

“Don’t wear them like that anymore,” Hux scowls, crossing his arms as Kylo licks bacon grease from his fingers. “Besides, you’re the brooding biker. Aren’t you supposed to be the one who enjoys hanging out on shady street corners?”

 

“Actually, I don’t mind the whole ‘open road’ thing,” the aforementioned man answers, grinning wickedly. “But I’m not averse to this place.”

 

“‘Forget the past. Kill it, if you have to.’ That's what you used to say, right?”

 

“Yeah,” Kylo answers, flask pulled from his pocket, draining the remainder of his whiskey into his own sweetened caffeine. “Think maybe it’s starting to work.”

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> thank you to everyone who's read this and left such wonderful and kind comments. <3 I appreciate everything

**Author's Note:**

> This work is especially personal to me, so I may be moderating comments with this fic if I am to receive any blowback over posting it. Though feel free to tell me, explicitly, if you believe I should add any tags. (That said, comments do make my day, though. I treasure them!)
> 
> Expect the second part sometime within the month. I no longer have the freedom or capacity for writing I previously did. Apologies.


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